Author Results for Michelle Kung

As a filmmaker, Andrew Rossi finds himself drawn to fields that are in need of disruption. His previous film “Page One: Inside the New York Times” analyzed the struggles of the newspaper industry, and his latest, “Ivory Tower,” tackles the crisis in higher education in America.

Rossi says he was drawn to the subject of higher education because of a confluence of events. Having attended Yale University and Harvard Law School, he had always thought of college as a very rewarding experience that provided a nurturing environment akin to being at home or in church. But with the rise of venture capitalists like Peter Thiel offering students a two-year, $100,000 scholarship to start a business in lieu of going to college, student loan debt passing $1 trillion, and online education through massive open online courses (MOOCs) expanding, the conversation concerning higher education had soured and he was curious to illustrate why.

Speakeasy talked with Rossi last week at the Sundance Film Festival, where “Ivory Tower” made its debut. Read More »

In the new documentary “Fed Up,” director Stephanie Soechtig, narrator/executive producer Katie Couric and executive producer Laurie David shine a light on whether the food industry is manipulating the country’s youth through the eyes of roughly half a dozen children struggling with their weight and overall health.

In particular, the film traces the rise of the low-fat craze in the 1980s and the subsequent rise of sugar in allegedly healthy foods, like low-fat peanut butter and low-fat salad dressing.

The film, which was acquired for distribution by Radius-TWC at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, has been three-and-a-half years in the making and found its genesis when Soechtig appeared on Couric’s online show to promote her 2009 documentary “Tapped.” Couric was impressed by how Soechtig stood up to the bottled water industry and thought she was the perfect person to help her make a film about one of her pet issues: childhood obesity. Read More »

In John Ford’s Western “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” Jimmy Stewart’s aging senator is famously told by a newspaper reporter, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner take this approach to heart in their new film “Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.” The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah this week, stars “Pacific Rim” co-star Rinko Kikuchi as the titular Kumiko, an eccentric Japanese office worker who is convinced that the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film “Fargo” is real and Steve Buscemi’s decidedly fictional character actually buried a suitcase full of money under the snow. Determined to retrieve the suitcase, Kumiko travels from Tokyo to Minnesota and seeks help from a series of several friendly locals as she pursues her single-minded quest. Read More »

Filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s tense, slow-burn spy thriller “A Most Wanted Man” is very much an international affair. Based on British author John le Carré’s 2008 bestseller, the film was directed by the Dutch Corbijn, adapted by Australian writer Andrew Bovell, visually constructed by French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, and stars a talented cast of Americans, Germans, Russians, Iranians, Turks, and Canadians – many of whom were on hand to celebrate the film’s official premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Sunday night in Park City, Utah.

“We tried to keep the film as authentic as possible,” said Corbijn, who joined his stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe over a dinner of lamb meatballs and jidori chicken at Eveleigh at Show Lodge following the premiere. Le Carre’s setting of Hamburg, Germany, where some of the 9/11 terrorists lived and planned their attack, was inseparable from his spy story’s plot, so Corbijn spent 38 of his 40 shooting days filming around the city’s harbors, red light district and industrial zones. (The last two shooting days were in Berlin.) Read More »

It’s been an unpredictable, but intensely rewarding year for Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim. This morning, “The Square,” her verite portrait of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution and several of its most passionate activists, was nominated for best documentary feature at the 2014 Oscars.

At this time last year, the documentary director was scrambling to finish “The Square” before its January premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. A year later, Noujaim is releasing a new version of the film which takes into account the forced military removal of the Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi in the summer of 2013. The emotionally-gripping film has also won a slew of awards, including the Audience Award at both Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. Noujaim personally is up for a Director’s Guild of America Award.

This Friday, “The Square” will debut in several select cities — including San Francisco and Chicago. It will simultaneously start streaming on Netflix.

The San Francisco Film Society hosted its first annual Fall Celebration Thursday night, jumping into the fall awards season mix and honoring four very disparate films: the dramas “Fruitvale Station,” “Her” and “Nebraska,” and the documentary “The Square.”

Designed to simultaneously honor cinema and raise money for the SFFS’s year-round programs in exhibition, education and filmmaker services, the event brought together filmmakers and patrons at San Francisco’s new social club The Battery, where guests could mingle and bid on experiences like a quarterback training session with Joe Montana. Read More »

In a 30-minute special that aired simultaneously in the U.S. and U.K., the BBC announced that Scottish actor Peter Capaldi would be the newest star of the long-running sci-fi program “Doctor Who.” Capaldi will play the twelfth incarnation of the character known as “The Doctor,” an alien who wanders the universe in a time machine disguised as a blue police box.

Capaldi, 55, may be best known to US audiences for his role as a foul-mouthed director of communications in Armando Iannucci’s political comedy “In the Loop.”

Internet fans were also quick to point out that the actor recently played a “W.H.O. Doctor” in the Brad Pitt summer action film “World War Z.”

Capaldi will replace Smith, who was introduced as the eleventh Doctor in January 2009. In a taped interview, Smith said that while he has loved the experience, “When you gotta go, you gotta go.” He also recalled that there was a backlash when he was case, because he was 26 and unknown, but he’s grown into a fan favorite. Read More »

“My Education,” Susan Choi’s new novel about a young graduate student’s torrid affair with a married woman, marks a departure in subject for the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author. While her first three novels were loosely based on real, headline-making events — such as the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Unabomber case and the Wen Ho Lee accusations — her latest substitutes historical tension for relationship-driven angst and nostalgia.

“I felt it was time to write a different kind of book,” says Choi, who adds that her changed life circumstances — she had a second baby after finishing 2008’s “A Person of Interest” — also played a part in the decision.

“Doing a lot of historical research was galvanizing for my first three books,” she says. “I loved the process, but I got a little lost in it and to be honest, I was exhausted. Plus, with the other books, I was seized upon by these ideas and they were born of my own preoccupations. That wasn’t what happened this time.” Read More »

In 2010, the British Film Institute (BFI) launched an ambitious plan to save the “Hitchcock 9.” Representing nine of the iconic British director Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest surviving works, the scattered and damaged films were researched, pieced together, properly restored and digitally preserved as part of the United Kingdom’s pre-2012 Olympics effort to show off the best of British culture.

The restorations couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. The nine black-and-white silent films, which include Hitchcock’s first film “The Pleasure Garden” (1926) and what the director dubbed his first “true Hitchcock picture” “The Lodger” (1926), were found to be in varying degrees of deterioration, with parts of prints found in archives all around the world. Now patched together as comprehensively as possible, the restored films will be presented throughout the United States this summer, beginning at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this weekend with the live musical accompaniment of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, British composer-pianist Stephen Horne, and other artists. Read More »

The San Francisco International Film Festival, the country’s longest-running film fest, wrapped its 56th edition Thursday night with a screening of director Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight.” Linklater was on hand with co-star Julie Delpy to discuss the third film in his “Before” series, which has been making the festival rounds and officially opens May 24.

The two shared anecdotes about the production process – lots of rehearsals, why Delpy decided to go partially nude – and Linklater made a point of congratulating festival head Ted Hope, a veteran producer who became the San Francisco Film Society’s new executive director last year. Read More »

Two weeks ago, actress and singer Patti LuPone grabbed a cell phone out of the hand of an audience member who was texting during a performance of her current play, "Shows for Days." The bold move led to an outpouring of support from fans fed up with glowing screens. Ms. LuPone gives us her five rules of theater etiquette.